The Rosegarden team have announced the release of version 1.7.0 of Rosegarden, the audio and MIDI sequencer and musical notation editor for Linux. This release focuses mostly on notation enhancements, although there are also substantial bug fixes in other areas.

The world of sequencer software for Linux is becoming increasingly well populated with projects designed for different types of user -- with the appearance of QTractor, a MusE stable release expected soon, Ardour 3 in the pipeline for studio users, as well as commercial software such as Renoise, and old favourites like seq24.

This is great for Rosegarden, as it means they no longer feel they have to please everyone: they are able to concentrate on the area that they find most interesting for Rosegarden, namely as a sequencer for people who also like to work in notation. Of course, all of the other existing features will continue to be supported and to evolve, but they have a clearer focus for the future than they have had.

The 1.7.0 release includes new contributions from established project members Heikki Junes, Arnout Engelen, and Pedro Lopez-Cabanillas. Translator Yves Guillemot has come over to the development side as well. New members Philippe Macaire and Jaakko H. Kyro have joined the development team, while Gunhild Andersen has joined as a documentation writer. They have also had code contributions from Colin Fletcher, Alessandro Preziosi, Stefan Asserhall, "Flameeyes" Pettenò, and Anders Dahnielson, and a segment parameter presets database update from Magnus Johansson -- and many new device library contributions.

Progress during this release cycle has been slow but steady, with relatively little developer time available from the core team, but for this release -- coordinated by D. Michael McIntyre -- they have managed to bring together more contributions from more people than in any previous release of Rosegarden.

New Features in 1.7.0:

Track headers in Notation view.

Test to see if a newer version is available, to help users stay up to date when distros sometimes carry quite old versions.

New Welcome dialog that attempts to help you tweak your setup for best results.

Notation: The preferred stem direction in a chord around the middle line is down, which better meshes with LilyPond.

Notation: The preferred beam position in a beamed group around the middle is below.

Move to Staff Above or Staff Below to make sorting out overlapping voice parts considerably easier.

Radically reformed grace notes now work correctly for the first time in Rosegarden's history, and are now easy to use.

Sync segments to track parameters (correct clef, transpose notation, alter key signatures, highest/lowest playable notes) available as option when using the load preset button in the Track Parameters Box, which greatly simplifies the process of converting a standard MIDI file into notation suitable for real musicians who play transposing instruments.

"Convert notation for..." function added to notation editor to provide another mechanism for using the sync segments functionality.

Expanded/corrected instrument presets database.

Export markers to LilyPond.

Alternative shortcut for Play/Stop in laptop use: Ctrl+Return.

New track parameters for exporting square, curly, and nested brackets to LilyPond, making it possible to produce true piano notation and complex orchestral scores properly for the first time, without hand editing of the .ly code. (Replaces the now deprecated "Export staff group bracket" option with this new and much more flexible scheme.).

The transport mode setting is now stored with and restored from individual compositions.

Export the new radically reformed grace notes into LilyPond syntax.

Now ties can finally be flipped (Chris, since rev 8653) and the flipped ties exported to LilyPond.

Arbitrary dynamics exported to LilyPond as markups if they are not on LilyPond's list of supported dynamic types.

Set a quick playback position marker in the main window with Ctrl+1 and recall it with 1.

New variable height tracks finally make working with overlapping segments (e.g. to contain concurrent voices for notation purposes) an easy and reasonable process, instead of the nightmare it has been for years.

Smarter selections in matrix and notation views now allow you to remove individual, previously-selected events without beginning the entire selection process from scratch.